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zorvek (Kevin Jones)Flag for United States of America

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Bad SSD

I have a solid state drive that suddenly went south. I know the data is still there but when I mount it and look at it with Windows Disk Management, it sees the drive but shows it as unallocated.

Is there a tool that can poke around an unallocated drive?
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Partition Wizard have free Undelete partition.
That's what I meant. Wrong terminology. :(
Lost Partition Recovery is free just 1GB ...
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dlethe, it can be that a partition is simple deleted and undeleting it would be a solution.

Just curious, what would the company do with a USB stick I need data from? What kind of hardware do they use for it?
P.S. It can't possibly be cables.  A SATA device only needs 2 wires to read, and 2 wires to write.  If any wire was disconnected you wouldn't see anything at all.
Wires usually are not disconnected. Usually it is just bad contact.

User generated imageI have seen a lot of connectors can look like this. It is not some great picture, but I hope that you can see that upper side have deformation.
A single disconnected connection would result in the computer seeing nothing at all.  It couldn't see the device and not read from it.  Both are types of reads (the EC command is the inquiry that returns 512 bytes; reading the data can be one of several opcodes that would also return 512 bytes or more)
, and if there is only one read wire, then neither would work, not just one of them work.
Noxcho  - the recovery company will do USB sticks.  They literally take them apart.   24hourdata.com can recover SSDs and USB sticks --- certainly it depends on the damage, but these people are good.
Well, my case from a week ago tells a different story.
At first my SSD become slow from here and there, and then worked normally. About 5 days after that behavior started I could not start windows from that drive. I started windows from second drive, and set to check that drive for errors, but somewhere on the half of the drive - fatal error - windows cannot continue to check disk.
I inserted SSD in enclosure, check disk finished it's job. I checked SATA cable from the picture - and replaced it. SSD works normally.

There's a possibility that similar situation can be in this case (not that this is the same case). That OS could not properly write information to drive and partition disappeared.

So, since it is cheap (or free) and easy to swap SATA cable with DVD-RW other HDD or SATA drive, does not really hurt to check cable.
:)
Nevertheless .. a SATA device uses 2 wires to read, as it is a serial device.  The ATA INQUIRY and READ commands send/receive data over the same 2 wires.  It is going to be all or nothing.  It is not possible for one command to work and the other not to if the problem is a cable.

In your case you must have had an itermittant connection that would have resulted in ALL commands failing after some point. That is different then what the user describes here.  The user's INQUIRY command works, but READ commands consistently fail.   Explain how that can happen due to a bad cable.
P.S. I actually WRITE diagnostic code for HDDs & SSDs, RAID controllers, iSCSI and other devices, and have been doing so for over 20 years.   Some of my customers are in the data recovery business. I know what I am talking about, OK?

This particular drive can be verified using a binary editor.  Read block 0 with binary editor and see if you get a read error, or you see raw data. Repeat with block 1.  If the data exists and partition was blown away then it will be self-evident.
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I like the attention guys but this is looking more like a discussion versus a question and answer, no?

OK, OK, at least you're not discussing politics or each others' nicknames ;-)

As far as cables go, this is an internal drive on a relatively new Dell laptop and, when I took the drive out and connected it via a special dongle to another computer's USB port, it continued to look like an unallocated drive.

I'll be getting back to this in the next hour or so.

Kevin
what about my post?  i saw no answer to that..
Run on it Undelete Partition or as Paragon it calls Recover Lost Partition wizard.
Status:

Paragon rescue kit - could not get it to boot. Just a blank screen with a dash.

DARTS - I can't find anything useful to download. Just a lot of marketing/support stuff.

GetDataBack - Read the whole disk but couldn't find what it needed to do whatever it does.

MiniTool Partition Wizard - Can't find any recoverable partition.

Anything else?

Kevin
Google for "Binary Editor" and find one that reads raw physical blocks.  Post a screen shot of physical block #0 & physical block #1.  This will confirm what is really there, or if you have read errors.
If you are a linux guy,   dd if=/dev/sdb  of=/tmp/raw bs=512k count=2    
then use od or the hd program to print out hexdump of this 1024 byte long file


That will do the same,  replace /dev/sdb with correct device name of the SSD

this is perfect
paragon - what did you download, and how did you nurn the cd?
DART - sorry, here download page    http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35494
GDB - so it read the disk, and did not show your data?? can you post a picture of what it shows then?
Paragon - I downloaded the Paragon Rescue Kit and created the default Windows boot disk on a USB stick.

DART - See below.

GDB - A simple dialog stating that nothing could be found.

In any event, the Dell technician came and went and the bad drive is on it's way back to Dell.

Now it's time to rebuild.

Thank you all!

Kevin